I have been doing Web Site design for over five years now. Although it
is something anyone can do, producing quality work requires
certain skills. At the very least anyone wishing to seriously attempt
Web Site design should posess a sense of aesthetics and a passing
knowledge of producing layouts. There are far too many sites out there
that are unviewable or functionally useless because these two aspects
are sorely lacking. But over and above these skills, familiarity with
the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is also essential.
Having the proper tools with which to develop Web pages is also
important. This implies, at the least, a Web Page editor that allows
you to work with HTML directly. WYSIWYG editors should be avoided at
all costs, since they have a tendency to generate sloppy code that,
very often, only looks good or behaves as expected within the editor
itself (Microsoft FrontPage is a good example of this). Fortunately
there are several excellent Editors which offer the best of both
worlds. These include Macromedia's HomeSite,
Sausage Software's HotDog
and Chami's HTML-Kit.
Other useful tools to have on-hand are a Stylesheet editor such as
Bradbury Software's TopStyle
(which is included with HomeSite), and some sort of image editing
software with which to produce graphics for your Site(s). Audio, Video
and Scripted code development tools should be considered for advanced
Site development.
